Opinion: Hidden Motives and Veiled Truths at the Legislature's Special Session

By State Rep. Stephen Harding

Who would have thought we’d be back here again at the start of December? I can tell you that as a caucus, we Republicans knew that the budget could not remain sustainable for long. That’s why fought keenly through the night to achieve a better financial plan back in June. When our attempts to amend the unbalanced budget failed that night, we had no choice but to vote against it if we wanted something better for Connecticut.

But we didn’t see it happening this soon. We already projecting to find ourselves sunk into a $350 million deficit a mere six months from now.

Our leaders met with the majority party’s leaders, and the governor, several times in recent weeks to settle this issue of Connecticut’s deficit mitigation in bipartisan discussions. However, an agreement could not be reached in this manner, and our calls for a special session were finally conceded.

When the House convened yesterday, the Republican caucus offered resolutions to amend House Rules and require the legislature to vote on union contracts and hold the legislature to a state spending cap. Unfortunately, both were denied on procedural grounds.

The first major piece of legislation we faced was whether or not to create a transportation “lock box.” A constitutional transportation lock box is a financial account that contains, and protects via certain restrictions, revenues from gasoline sales and other taxes that can solely be used for projects relating to transportation. That account, or “box,” could not be opened, nor could the funds be withdrawn, for any other purposes.

Yet that’s not really what the majority party wanted to do. Behind the Democrat’s proposal of an apparently, and supposedly, effective lockbox is a veiled attempt to divert funds to other accounts in an attempt to balance their sink hole of a budget. These behind-the-scenes “fixes” have been practiced for years, and will only be further enabled by the language in which the lock box legislation was framed.

We offered amendments to fortify the lock box, particularly by making the language stronger and expressly giving courts the standing to allow for legal challenges if the lock box was raided. These initiatives were also rejected by the majority party.

The vote to implement the lock box ended up passing 100 to 40, but not by the 75% affirmative vote required to include the legislation on next year’s ballot. Therefore, as the ruling would have it, the resolution will be reconsidered for law during the 2018 legislative session.

Still, what’s worse was what came next: the short-term Band-Aid known as the proposed deficit mitigation package. The plan neglected to address Connecticut’s real problems, and didn’t make any of the structural changes we had assembled. After recent onerous cuts to our first-rate hospitals, the package didn’t even make a dent in restoring much-needed funding to our healthcare institutions.

Within hours of the lock box vote, the deficit mitigation plan vote bill passed 75 to 65 and diverted $35.2 million that was meant to be credited to the lock box from the Special Transportation Fund into the General Fund, illustrating the lack of discipline consistent with past legislatures.

On the same day that the majority party boasted of their fiscal responsibility and determination to protect much-needed transportation infrastructure funds, they denied millions of dollars from being deposited into that the account that would do just that and instead set the budget deficit for 2017 at a predicted $358 million, and $1.7 billion in 2018.